17. This was done on the thirteenth day of the month of Adar, and on the fourteenth day they rested and made it a day of feasting and gladness.
18. But the Jews who were in Shushan [Susa] assembled on the thirteenth day and on the fourteenth, and on the fifteenth day they rested and made it a day of feasting and gladness.
19. Therefore the Jews of the villages, who dwell in the unwalled towns, make the fourteenth day of the month of Adar a day of gladness and feasting, a holiday, and a day for sending choice portions to one another.
20. And Mordecai recorded these things, and he sent letters to all the Jews who were in all the provinces of the King Ahasuerus, both near and far,
21. To command them to keep the fourteenth day of the month of Adar and also the fifteenth, yearly,
22. As the days on which the Jews got rest from their enemies, and as the month which was turned for them from sorrow to gladness and from mourning into a holiday–that they should make them days of feasting and gladness, days of sending choice portions to one another and gifts to the poor.
23. So the Jews undertook to do as they had begun and as Mordecai had written to them–
24. Because Haman son of Hammedatha, the Agagite, the enemy of all the Jews, had plotted against the Jews to destroy them and had cast Pur, that is, the lot, [to find a lucky day] to crush and consume and destroy them.
25. But when Esther brought the matter before the king, he commanded in writing that Haman's wicked scheme which he had devised against the Jews should return upon his own head, and that he and his sons should be hanged on the gallows.
26. Therefore they called these days Purim, after the name Pur [lot]. Therefore, because of all that was in this letter and what they had faced in this matter and what had happened to them,